Terence Corcoran: The blockades are a clash over socialism, not Indigenous rights and climate change

Barricades are a tool that appear to be succeeding in Canada, used to promote a radical remake of Canadian society

Supporters of the indigenous Wet'suwet'en Nation's hereditary chiefs camp at a railway blockade as part of protests against British Columbia's Coastal GasLink pipeline, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada February 19, 2020.Codie McLachlan/Reuters

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Can we now please end this great Canadian delusion, entertained over the past few weeks, that the blockades leading to Monday’s police takedowns and Teck Resource’s oilsands decision are part of a momentous clash over Indigenous rights and climate change? They are not.

The blockades themselves are an ideological construct designed to help the radical left, socialists and agglomerations of anti-capitalists to impose a new economic model on Canada — and the rest of the world.

The Indigenous aspect is also manufactured, with whole communities manipulated into fronting for the radical objectives of New Green Dealers, whose aim is to shut down the world’s major energy system and usher in the next paradise of equality and clean prosperity via state takeover.

As for the climate, it is merely a pretext, a marketing tool for radicals who aim to bring down capitalism.

Nobody knows this better than Naomi Klein, one of the world’s prime popularizers of the idea that the climate issue is the left’s last great opportunity for a socialist revolution. As she once said, “The real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system — one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power.”

On Monday, after Teck Resources pulled the plug on its Frontier oilsands project, Klein enthusiastically tweeted her support for Indigenous Climate Action, an activist group that backed the blockades that shut down much of Canada’s rail industry. “Congratulations on this huge win,” said Klein. “You have been tireless in making this happen and protecting the land, water and planet as a whole. It’s wrenching watching the Trudeau government violate Indigenous rights across the country but this is a major victory.”

Klein has a right to be satisfied. The rail blockades that have brought Canada to its knees are modelled on ideas in Klein’s 2014 book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate.” A whole chapter of the book is titled, “Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors.”

The book is a 560-page anti-Enlightenment screed that attempts to tear down the entire canon of Western thought — from the scientific method, to Adam Smith and Francis Bacon. To replace all that, she argued, we need a bottom-up revolution, based on climate change and Blockadia.

Blockadia, writes Klein, is the “only remaining variable” that can be used to bring down “the “profiteering and escalating barbarism” of the free enterprise economy. The option is to “block the road, and simultaneously clear some alternative pathways to destinations that are safer. If that happens, well, it changes everything.”

Klein sees manifestations of this resistance in “Blockadia’s fast multiplying local outposts, the fossil fuel divestment/reinvestment movement, the local laws barring high-risk extraction, the bold court challenges by Indigenous groups and others.”

It is worth noting, for the benefit of all our green socially responsible central bankers and financial institution CEOs, that Klein the socialist revolutionary sees divestment as a kind of financial Blockadia. “The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions,” she argues.

In short: while Blockadia demonstrators and activists stand at the railway barricades to stop the flow of goods and services, before being hauled away by police, the world’s financial players and institutions are at the front line of plans to stop the flow of funds to corporations that are not living up to their environmental, social and green responsibilities.

Financial blockades, in other words, are akin to the rail blockades. The process of taking on the extractive economy “is leading a great many people to face up to the underlying democratic crisis.”

There can be no doubt about Blockadia’s radical objectives and Klein’s intentions. Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis, are also founders of the “Leap Manifesto,” a plan to reshape Canada into a socialist state. The list of Leap backers is long and filled with the names of social, environmental and community activists, along with bevies of entertainers and some politicians. No bankers, it would appear. But who knows?

On activist websites such as the Energy Mix, the Blockadia movement is tracked and mapped as a global phenomena. Real successes are hard to find. Canada appears to be an exception, perhaps because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has often supported the movement’s objectives.

The current Energy Mix site has a photo of Greenpeace and anti-Teck student activists occupying the Montreal offices of Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, himself a former blockadist who once scaled Toronto’s CN Tower as part of a climate protest. “To me, civil disobedience was never a goal in and of itself. It was just a tool,” Guilbealt has said.

Just a tool. But one that appears to be succeeding in Canada, where climate and fractured Indigenous communities are being used to promote a radical remake of Canadian society.

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